The present invention pertains generally to printer driver configurations. More particularly, the present invention is related to retrieve and communicate information by a client machine from a printer connected to a local area network.
As a printer driver is downloaded, e.g., point-and-print, from a print server in a Windows NT domain, the port information of the shared driver in the print server is not available to the downloaded driver. Instead of showing \\PrinterName\PrintQueue as would a locally installed driver, the port of such downloaded driver shows \\PrintServerName\SharedDriverName, which is a pseudo port or rather, a link path to the print server. Therefore, downloaded drivers cannot communicate with the printer to obtain information from the printer due to the misrepresentation of port information, although print jobs will be successfully sent to the real port instead of the pseudo port. Such an example of communications problems occurs on a computer network using Novell software, particularly Novell NetWare. A printer driver is mapped to a local port, such as LPT1, which is captured as the Novell Printer Port. However, in this circumstance, the client computer has no information about the printer port to which it is actually mapped.
Novell NetWare utilizes a proprietary addressing system similar to the Internet Protocol communications protocol, referred to as Internetwork Packet Exchange protocol, or IPX. Internet Protocol, or IP, addressing is based on the concept of hosts and networks. A host is essentially anything on the network that is capable of receiving and transmitting IP packets on the network, such as a workstation or a router. It is not to be confused with a server: servers and client workstations are all IP hosts. The hosts are connected together by one or more networks. The IP address of any host consists of its network address plus its own host address on the network.
IP addressing, unlike, IPX addressing, uses one address containing both network and host address. How much of the address is used for the network portion and how much for the host portion varies from network to network. An IP address is 32 bits wide, and as discussed, it is composed of two parts: the network number, and the host number [1, 2, 3]. By convention, it is expressed as four decimal numbers separated by periods, such as “200.1.2.3” representing the decimal value of each of the four bytes. Valid addresses thus range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255, a total of about 4.3 billion addresses. An IPX address consists of a 4-byte Network Number, a 6-byte Node Number, and a 2-byte Socket Number. The node number is usually the hardware address of the interface card, and must be unique inside the particular IPX network. The network number must be the same for all nodes on a particular physical network segment. Socket numbers correspond to the particular service being accessed.
Thus there is a need for a method and system to retrieve information on a specific printer irrespective of the printer port to which the printer is mapped.